More Awesome Than Money (9 page)

The extent of this power was reported by Hanna Nikkanen in
Voima,
a Finnish newspaper, in an article that quoted from a manual for the equipment: “Collecting interception data is a process which takes place in the ‘background,' assuring that the intercepted target (end user) is never aware of a possible interception. . . . The maximum number of simultaneous active interception sessions is 50,000.”

During his interrogation, Isa Saharkhiz was beaten and injured. He was sentenced to three years in prison for actions deemed subversive and disrespectful to the supreme leader, and his health declined. “We understand that he is now in a wheelchair,” Mehdi said.

Nokia Siemens, having sold its surveillance gear as the avant-garde of technology for governments of all stripes, was called before the European Parliament in June 2010 to explain its provision of such equipment to repressive regimes. As it happened,
European regulators had themselves been at the forefront of pushing for the integration of more powerful surveillance and tracking standards in mobile phone networks.

“
Governments in almost all nations required operators to deploy Lawful Interception as a condition of their license to operate,” Barry French, a Nokia Siemens executive, told the hearing. This was a passive
component, he said, that most likely was already in the phones used by everyone in the hearing room. “And for good reason: to support law enforcement in combating things like child pornography, drug trafficking and terrorism.”

The monitoring centers were a separate, but necessary, component from the Lawful Interception features, he said; they gave enormous power to law enforcement agencies, at times bypassing oversight functions.

“Monitoring centers are, in our view, more problematic and have a risk of raising issues related to human rights that we are not adequately suited to address,” French testified.

So Nokia Siemens had started to get out of the monitoring business a few months before the disputed 2009 presidential elections in Iran, he said. But not before it had installed a system that made it possible for the tracking of Isa Saharkhiz and others.

“We believe we should have understood the issues in Iran better in advance and addressed them more proactively,” French testified. “There have been credible reports from Iran that telecommunications monitoring has been used as a tool to suppress dissent and freedom of speech.”

Nokia Siemens could not reinvent history, he said, but it could learn from it. And he reminded the legislators that there were tensions among ideals and technology, and international agreements on standards.

“Consider the fact that the systems that we provided to Iran were designed to implement a right that the [International Telecommunications Union] has said is held by member states, and are required by law in the vast majority of those member states,” French testified.

Societies evolve, he said, leaders change, and governments do not remain static over the life of a set of technologies.

“We are always at risk of finding that we have deployed technology that seemed appropriate for use by one government only to find it misused by the next,” he said. A fair enough point in the abstract, but the Iranian regime was already authoritarian in character when Siemens Nokia supplied the surveillance equipment.

An American company called Blue Coat Systems, of Sunnyvale, California, provided surveillance and censorship equipment to more than a dozen countries, including ones with histories of vivid abuse of human
rights—like Syria, Saudi Arabia, and China. Other countries included Russia, Bahrain, and Thailand, according to a report in 2013 by the Citizen Lab Internet research group at the University of Toronto.

It was a matter of definitions. One person might see a surveillance package as a sentinel for people haunting cyberspace with disfigured appetites for children, or notions of how to slaughter civilians; another might see it as a way of hunting and crushing dissent.

As the four Diaspora guys set out to build their project, the Internet was still in its big bang moment, the clouds of its atoms nowhere near settled into recognizable forms. Its short history was summed up by Rob Faris of Harvard's Berkman Center during a conference in Budapest on digital liberties: “A bunch of smart people invented the Internet; another person added World Wide Web. Soon tons of people were saying, hey, this is great. We can share recipes for cookies; can share tips for gardening and knitting; we can create groups to share science fiction.”

It was also, he pointed out, a source of recipes for bombs, a platform for incitement and subversion and persecution, and, sometimes, a tool of liberation. And it was grafted into every dark corner of the human psyche.

“Millions of other people said, hey, the Internet is great for porn as well. Others,” Faris said, “offered up ways to more effectively commit suicide.”

M
ax turned his head, unable to watch. Out of the blue, Ilya had just volunteered to show a bit of Diaspora's progress to a group of about forty fellow hackers—people who, for much longer, without any attention from mainstream news organizations like the
New York Times,
and certainly with no monsoons of Kickstarter cash, had been working toward essentially the same goals as the four young men from NYU. In mid-July, the group had gathered in Portland, Oregon, for a summit.

Just when the serious business of the day was winding down and people were packing up to go sample the city's artisanal beers, Ilya volunteered to show one of the group's gurus, Evan Prodromou, how a particular Diaspora feature worked.

“This is not the moment to do a demo that we've never actually tested,” Max muttered. “And not in front of this audience.”

But Ilya already had his laptop open, and Prodromou was leaning over his shoulder.

“This is when things never work,” an onlooker commiserated with Max.

Another person, in the back of the room, Jon Phillips, was blunt about Diaspora. “These guys are vaporware,” he declared. Prodromou was also a skeptic. One purpose of the summit, he had said, was to dispel the notion
that some “messianic” force by itself could achieve their goals. But if people there hadn't figured out by then that the Diaspora Four had no illusions about being messiahs, then Ilya's wide-eyed guilelessness, his unguarded exuberance about sharing an early draft of the work in progress went a long way to allaying such fears.

Long before Diaspora lit up Kickstarter, Prodromou and other members of the group in the room had toiled in anonymity to make it possible for people to use the web as a social tool, on their own terms. Share a photo? Give a thumbs-up for someone's comment on an article that had been posted? Track down old friends? All these things could be done without having to go through Facebook or anything like it. With the right tools, they believed, each person could and should be sovereign over what he or she chose to share. Moreover, there was no reason that a person on Facebook should not be able to connect with a person in another network.

Those were the general principles of what this group of hackers called the federated social web. Services like Facebook fenced in their users, deciding what sites they could interact with and how they could display information. The better model, in the view of the federated social web group, was the telephone: no matter what brands or models of phone two people were using to converse, regardless of whether they were customers of AT&T or Verizon, they could call each other and send text messages. At the summit, the hackers spoke about ways to make that happen on the web.

At its essence, the World Wide Web created by Tim Berners-Lee and his generation was entirely federated: it consisted of databases of documents that were stored around the world in millions of digital libraries, called servers, and connected through the Internet. Regardless of who had created them or how they were stored, web browsers made it possible to view any of them that were not restricted by passwords. There was no high wall to block users from communicating with someone else on the web just because the two parties used different servers, for instance, or one person had text files while another had photos. Similarly, e-mail is federated: a message can be sent from one service to another, like a person with a Gmail account writing to someone with a Yahoo! account, or a personal mail server. The hackers at the federated social web summit saw
no reason those principles should not apply to all kinds of personal sharing.

“From the point of view of a typical social website, if you don't have an account on that site, you don't exist,” Prodromou said. “The only way for your friends on that site to interact with you is if they invite you to join the site. Despite the fact that there are hundreds of other social networking sites on the web, almost every single one works as if there were zero other social networks on the web.”

To get around this, Tantek Çelik, another of the organizers, explained that loosely affiliated hackers had spent years developing and agreeing on short strings of code, microformats. Each string performed what seemed like an elementary task. For instance, one allowed a user to authentically identify himself to another, and made it possible for the receiving party to answer back with a persuasive confirmation of her identity. Another let a single message be published to a list of contacts. They might have seemed simple, but it was essential that people making software reach a consensus that these strings—rather than some other formula—were the methods that would be used. By the agreement of this community of makers, some of them in start-ups, others in major corporations, these microformats were the building blocks of a social web. They belonged to no one. It was principle-driven work. Plus it was practical: why shouldn't they be able to communicate to anyone, anywhere?

“The only way we are going to move social networks forward is if we can interact with our friends across social networks,” said Chris Messina, a Carnegie Mellon graduate who also had worked on the microformats before joining Google.

These microformats were wires, pipes, and valves, not exciting, but essential infrastructure. The Diaspora group had not said much about using them in building their project, and their arrival in this crusade, with their $200,000 in crowdsourced money, to the accompaniment of trumpets by the
New York Times,
was the occasion of grumbling, encouragement, and worry. Blaine Cook, at thirty, was one of the elders. Working as a lead developer for Twitter, Cook had created a microformat that allowed a Twitter user to connect to other applications without revealing password and identification information. After leaving Twitter, he
continued to fiddle with the standards. He had written to Diaspora and was eager to meet them in Portland. It was a relief; he was happy to see them succeed, but not to abandon the work that had already been knitted together.

“When I first saw the project, they had their own technology stack ideas,” Cook said. “All of us were like, ‘Oh, God, they'll set us back two years with the technology that they were proposing.' It was massively complicated. It was going to be the sort of thing where people look at it, and it's like, ‘Oh, this technology doesn't work, and let's abandon this idea.'”

Max and Ilya assured him that Diaspora was happy to discover a community of fellow travelers, and fully intended to use their protocols. “We're very glad that you guys have done all this already,” Max said.

Max turned to Dan. “Making standards is a thankless, awful job. It's like giving a root canal while you're getting one,” he said.

“Did you just think of that?” Dan said.

In the front of the room, Ilya had his laptop open and was showing Prodromou how Diaspora could use one of the micoformats to communicate with StatusNet, a microblogging company run by Prodromou.

“I was pleasantly surprised,” Prodromou wrote later. “Hard to believe how quickly this is moving along.”

Tantek Çelik said that all of their work had to be proven in real life, beginning with themselves. It was a cardinal principle of development: use the software yourself. Dunk it in a bath of real life. If you're making dog food, eat it.

“As soon as I build something, I try to dog-food it immediately,” Çelik said.

Interest in federation was hardly limited to the group in Portland; Diaspora had shown that there was excitement around the world. Not only could it mean better tools for socializing; it could also be a place for more vibrant political speech.

“
Consider that informed citizens worldwide are using online social networking tools to share vital information about how to improve their communities and their governments—and that in some places, the consequences if you're discovered to be doing so are arrest, torture or imprisonment,” wrote Richard Esguerra of the Electronic Frontier Foundation,
the influential force on digital and human rights issues. “With more user control, diversity, and innovation, individuals speaking out under oppressive governments could conduct activism on social networking sites while also having a choice of services and providers that may be better equipped to protect their security and anonymity.”

A
few minutes after nine, Ilya dropped his bag at the desk, grabbed a plate, and, working from a groaning board that he could have navigated with his eyes shut, speared waffles and bacon. Dan was already parked at a table, sipping coffee. Max was deep in conversation, his plate cleaned. Rafi was a few steps behind Ilya at the buffet. All armies, including coders, move on their stomachs.

By that Friday morning in early August 2010, the four guys had spent two months holed up in a big software development laboratory in San Francisco, working anonymously and ferociously. Before they left New York, everyone wanted a piece of them. The Grippi family discovered a television news crew parked outside their home one morning. Reporters from all over the world were hunting down any of the Diaspora guys to hear nerds declare war on other nerds. Anyone connected with Diaspora was hounded by a press corps eager to speak with the “Facebook Killers”—a title that was the snickering figment of a headline writer's mind, embodying an ambition the four guys had never uttered, or, as far as could be told, entertained.

“We have to just go and code,” Rafi had said. There was no point spending huge amounts of time to correct a twisted version of their hopes. They would otherwise never get anything done.

Other than to post a grateful blog item that was distributed to their Kickstarter list, saying that they were going to put their heads down and
work for the rest of the summer, the Diaspora Four said nothing about where they planned to do it or when they would emerge. They vanished. The windfall coinage of their celebrity in public had stunned them. Every second, eight new people were joining Facebook. As Goliath swelled, so did the importance of the Davids.

They were invited to chat with a man named Mitch Kapor, an elder and eminence of the tech world whose philanthropies, businesses, and causes occupied a few floors in an old warehouse building south of Market Street in San Francisco. People brought their dogs to work. The guys were charmed.

“I love what you're doing,” Kapor told them. “I want you to win.”

In 1982, Kapor cofounded Lotus Development Corporation, which offered a spreadsheet, database manager, and graphics package called Lotus 1-2-3. The company's business plan called for $1 million in sales the first year. It sold $53 million. Two years later, the revenue was $153 million. In the rearview mirror of history, the reason is obvious. Lotus showed how numbers move. It mapped patterns of change and rate. Trends buried in the density of numerals now were visible, backlit by Lotus. A simple spreadsheet program was an epochal change for people who labored with pencil, paper, and calculator to figure or forecast profit and loss, rate of return. Businesspeople, academics, and scientists lined up to buy computers so they could run Lotus. It became the first killer app. Bill Gates had once predicted that there would be a personal computer on every desk. Lotus showed why.

After selling the business, Kapor dove into digital progressivism, cofounding the Electronic Frontier Foundation and playing an obstetrical role in the birth of Firefox, the open-source browser that had changed the Internet. He had become convinced that Mark Zuckerberg was vastly overreaching and that an alternative to Facebook was needed. Earlier that year, as Kapor was reading an article online, a notice popped up informing him that an acquaintance had read and “liked” the same article. Furious, he picked through the setttings of his own Facebook account, hoping to minimize the appropriation of his interests.

So he was ready to hear about the Diaspora project. They could check in and keep him up to date, Kapor told them, and he would think about ways he might be helpful. In a pleasant haze, the guys wandered back to
their project, his words ringing in their ears. “Keep your heads down, keep working,” Kapor had told them.

Venture capital firms were writing. Besides the federated social web gathering in Portland, they had—thanks to Mitch Kapor—an invitation to speak at Mozilla, creator of the web browser Firefox, and at Razorfish, an online advertising firm. Bill Joy—the Edison of the Internet—wanted to meet, a scouting mission for the venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers. A writer with
New York
magazine who was friendly with their mentor, Evan Korth, had persuaded them to break their self-imposed embargo for a profile to be published in the fall.

The first big decision was what to do about the open offer from Randy Komisar to set themselves up for the summer in the incubator space at Kleiner Perkins on Sand Hill Road, the boulevard of gold in Silicon Valley. His invitation had arrived before the waves of publicity and the cosmically fortuitous timing of Facebook pissing off much of the planet. Not only was the notion of being in a VC incubator beyond any expectation, it was beyond conception. They had tentatively accepted. Yet that did not mean they could drop their Kickstarter pitch or the “four dudes eating pizza” tableau. Whether they were working in the basement of Max's mom's house or at the bottom of the Kleiner Perkins office, they would still need ramen money.

The sluice of donations changed everything, making it emotionally implausible for them to move in with venture capitalists. “People expect that we're going to go live in a shack somewhere and do this,” Dan said.

Ilya had been charmed by Randy—they were kindred enthusiasts—but he felt a tighter commitment to the people who had funded them to keep a kind of pure spirit of what they were doing. “We can't go the venture capital route now,” Ilya said.

Max and Rafi agreed. Moreover, they would not have to suffer for their principled stance. Another opportunity had emerged. Rafi's brother Mike, an experienced programmer, had just started work at Pivotal Labs, a leading software laboratory in downtown San Francisco that developed programs for companies like Best Buy and Twitter. Pivotal was a master workshop for “agile development,” which encouraged programmers to be adaptive in their solutions, a departure from the more rigid approach of working off a master blueprint.
It billed the services of its programmers
at about fifteen hundred dollars a day. Start-ups also hired Pivotal to show them the tricks of the trade, and would take up residence in the Pivotal offices while being nurtured. After the engagements finished, some of those start-ups ended up staying in the Pivotal space to keep working.

Diaspora certainly wasn't going to hire Pivotal, but Rob Mee, the company president, thought they were onto a good idea, if quixotic. He admired them. Plenty of people talked about building that kind of alternative social network, but no one had done it. Moreover, the guys were working in a programming framework called Ruby on Rails, a relatively new approach that was one of Pivotal's basic tools. So Pivotal happened to have the world's leading assemblages of experts in the very language they were using. Mee invited them to come work in the space for free.

With that offer in hand, they phoned Randy Komisar.

“It's really important to the spirit of the $200,000 that we raised that we be independent, and that we be perceived as fully independent,” Ilya said. “We're concerned that the people who have given us this money want us to be countercultural. We are concerned that being in your incubator would be an affront to that.”

“You know what?” Komisar said. “I buy that. So let's get together when you get out here. I'll do whatever I can to help you. Feel free to call on me.”

By early June, they had set up a four-man code factory in Pivotal's office on lower Market Street in San Francisco.

—

Spread across a wide-open floor, the Pivotal developers could count on a full breakfast every day, lunch on Wednesdays; a row of bikes hung from a wall; during lunch hour, a court of Ping-Pong tables next to the dining area was heavily used.

That was a casual gloss on a company that had a precise, disciplined approach to software development, the antithesis of the hacker ethic of staying up all night, writing code, and shoveling down pizza. The Pivotal programmers—they called themselves Pivots—worked from nine to six, and almost always in pairs, two people seeing the same screens as they worked. Pair programming helped to prevent white-line fever, the paradoxical effect named by long-distance truckers who look at something
for so long that they no longer can see it. In programming, the second set of eyes, Pivotal had found, cut down on both piddling errors and major logical flaws. It also built mentoring into the work. The programmers changed partners every day, avoiding the ruts that might develop between two people; it also ensured that the entire team was fluent in all elements of the project. The structure had been a revelation to Max, Dan, Ilya, and Rafi, who were accustomed to swarming over a project and keeping the long night hours of college students on deadline benders, with no fence between daylight and night.

On their first day in the office, absorbing this new culture, Rafi's brother Mike came over to chat with Max.

“Congratulations,” he said. “At the end of the summer, or when the project is finished, you'll be able to get jobs as software engineers.”

That was not where Max saw himself going.

“I want to be the CEO of a start-up,” he said.

Surrounded by developers whose programming talents were worth millions of dollars a year, the four NYU guys burrowed into what was practically the perfect cave—and near-perfect anonymity.

Nearly.

One afternoon, Rafi came up the stairs from the subway near the office on Market Street, and strolled blithely to the Pivotal offices.

A moment later, a stranger sent a tweet out into cyberspace:

I think I just got off the subway after Raphael from #Diaspora!

It initially unsettled him, but the others were simply amused.

—

For the first time in their lives, Max, Dan, Ilya, and Rafi were not working to someone else's schedule: no academic calendar, no summer job, no expectations. They were on their own. The funds from Kickstarter had been deposited into a bank account, and Dan's father, who had taken early retirement from Citibank, handled their finances. Their budget was austere: one-thousand-dollar monthly stipends, plus a housing allowance. Additional expenses were decided on an ad hoc basis, and Dan, the de facto treasurer, was notoriously careful with the money.

One day during the summer, Randy Komisar dropped by to chat with
the group. Mike Sofaer walked into the session with Komisar. Perhaps inevitably, Mark Zuckerberg's name came up, and his donation to their Kickstarter drive. Mike volunteered that he thought they should send a special thanks to Zuckerberg for his donation.

“We should be gentlemen about it,” Mike said. That set off a minidebate about the wisdom of having any contact with Zuckerberg.
It came to a close when Komisar remarked that whatever the risk of getting in touch with him, there was none associated with simply ignoring him.

Max and Dan were furious at Mike's intervention. Ilya was sent as an emissary to tell him that he was not welcome to weigh in on business questions.

Their days were long, intense. Rafi, with ample family connections in San Francisco, had found an apartment, but Max, Dan, and Ilya had all moved into rooms at a cheap hotel that housed students and budget tourists. They hated it, but none of them did much beyond sleeping there. Rafi joined a gym that Mike belonged to, and was disciplined about getting workouts and a full night's sleep. At the end of the workday, Ilya would take a short run through downtown San Francisco, and he inveigled Max, who had never worked out, to join him for mental health purposes.

It wasn't simply that they were a small group taking on a huge project. No one, not the wealthiest corporation, most powerful government agency, or a small crew of hackers, can reliably predict how long it will take to make a computer program. New York City gave out a $63 million contract in 1998 for a new timekeeping system. By 2011, the payments had climbed to $628 million, and the project wasn't finished. As of 1995, the Internal Revenue Service had spent ten years and $2 billion trying to upgrade tax computer systems, without success, according to
Dreaming in Code,
an account of software development by Scott Rosenberg. And it's not just government inefficiency; businesses also struggle to execute grand software plans. Rosenberg described how McDonald's spent $170 million on a failed program to track food in thirty thousand stores. In some respects, such failures made the complications in the rollout of the Affordable Care Act in 2013 look minor.

In a classic work on the subject,
The Mythical Man-Month,
published in 1975, the author, Fred Brooks, explained that throwing people at a software project was counterproductive. When a job was running late,
adding new people to it only delayed it. Each new programmer had to start from scratch, learning the logic already in place; teaching those concepts would consume the time of the incumbents.

A project that, in fanciful theory, should take one person three months would not be finished in one month if three people worked on it.

“Nine women can't make a baby in one month,” wrote Brooks, who had managed software development for IBM.

He offered practical advice for programmers. “Plan to throw one away,” Brooks wrote. “You will anyhow.”

—

Standing outside the Pivotal offices on Market Street early one morning, Max saw a man with mad-professor hair, in sandals, approaching them. It was Bill Joy. They greeted him with awe, and then broke the news: they couldn't get upstairs. It was too early and the building wasn't open yet. They had been so worried that Joy, with his deep technical chops, would throw harder questions at them than the venture capitalists and news reporters that they had not considered the logistics of meeting so early.

Joy, who had made some of the most significant breakthroughs in modern computing while packed into a near closet at Berkeley, was not fazed by the setting. They stood chatting about the elements of Diaspora. He reported back to Komisar. “We met on the sidewalk. They were wonderful,” Komisar recalled Joy saying. “They need to peel the onion, one layer at a time, and not just drive to the center.”